Central heating - running the ductwork

Our gas got hooked up a week ago, which means we've had seven blissful days of a temperate, evenly heated house. 

Before that could happen we had to run the ducting, as part of the deal we struck with the gasfitter. This took us a few days - partly because our work is often interrupted by a small person, and partly because we hadn't done it before so were working things out as we went. 

The first, doubtful join

The first snafu was on the very first join. We put the small one down for a nap, climbed into the roofspace, got the duct tape out... And second-guessed ourselves. The gasfitter had given us a quick lesson on how to tape the ducts up when he brought the kit around, but we wanted to refresh ourselves. So we googled. And (possibly for the first time ever), it wasn't helpful. 

Ducted central heating is most common in the United States - but all the US videos we found recommended against using duct tape, instead suggesting mastic glue and cable ties (the adhesive on the tape softens when exposed to heat, meaning the tape can let go when the system is in use). However, the videos all used metal junctions (ours are plastic) so we weren't sure if the advice translated to us. 

After a bit of (read: extensive) discussion and a chat to the gasfitter (who stood by the use of tape only) we decided we would get some cable ties, and use them with the tape for good measure. 

(aside: it seems ridiculous calling them "cable ties" when they are wrapped around a 350mm diameter duct, but - correct me if you know otherwise - that seems to be the term used here. I guess sometimes bunches of cables might get that large?)

Once we got into it, running the ducting was pretty simple: the objective is to keep the runs as straight and smooth as possible, so a little bit of thinking ahead is advisable. Though not what we did, with the benefit of hindsight I'd recommend laying out as many ducts as you can to see where they sit before connecting any. As well as trimming the ducting to length, hanging bendy bits (e.g. where it joins the ceiling vents) to ease the angle of the bend is recommended. 

This is a mostly-done shot - we hadn't finished hanging the ducts yet.
It's very hard to get good shots of how they run because everything's a bit crowded up there.

We were hoping we might be able to reuse some of the ceiling vents from the HRV, but these weren't ideally placed; most of them were close to doorways, and the heating vents are supposed to be as close to the outside of the room as possible. We have reused one upstairs, in the dining room / kitchen, which has three vents in total so one in the middle made sense, and currently both downstairs bedrooms are using the HRV holes, because we were loath to cut new holes in the recently painted, good condition gib... But we'll see how performance goes and move them if we need to. 

The trickiest part of vent placement is working out where they can sit - that job really needs two people, so one person can check out location in the room and the other can check for joists etc in the roofspace above. We did a bit of knocking and talking to try to roughly work out where we were, and then I would drill a hole from below in the centre of the proposed vent hole. My husband would then check from his side that the hole wouldn't hit anything and if it was good I'd draw a circle (the vents came in boxes which included a template, very helpful, though we could have made our own). 

Once the hole is there you poke the duct down through it, tape/cable tie on the vent, and push it into the hole. We also had to do a bit of jiggery-pokery (technical term) on a few of the holes, as our old house has several double ceilings so the clips on the vent didn't always work as perfectly as they ought. 

We also had to construct a return air duct - basically a chimney which takes the cooler air back up to be heated again. This has to be central (and is a large part of why the outlets need to be on the outside) so has consumed a large part of our hall cupboard. Our box is built out of MDF and chipboard; MDF on the visible side, for a good paint finish, and chipboard because we had a lot of it going to waste and it will do just as good a job. The most important functional outcome was for the box to be airtight, so plenty of sealant has been applied to all the joins. 

Because we would have boxed it in anyway we chose to build the box to the top of the cupboard and attach the duct at ceiling level, rather than ducting from lower down.

The inlet vent, which is mounted on the size, sits in a nice, snug hole - it has to be removable so the filter can be cleaned, so the lesson here is measure twice, cut once! Once the wall had a hole in it we cut pieces of MDF to line the cavity so the air goes into the box rather than up the wall. 

This is the least pretty part - the big return air vent - but it's no worse than a heat pump... I guess most heating systems have ugly bits.

We're pretty happy with how it runs - we're still fine-tuning a little but it's glorious to get up to a warm house... We are keen to see our first gas bill though!

I'll share a bit more about the pros and cons, the fine-tuning process and costs next week... Stay tuned!

Streamlined kitchens

We're pretty fond of a fairly minimalist, modern, and streamlined look, especially for kitchens. This week's job has been building our kitset cabinets into the surrounding walls to hopefully achieve something close to that.

This is both an aesthetic preference and a practical one; two metre high cabinets in a 2.7m high room leave a nasty dust-and-grease gathering gap that I am not at all a fan of. One way to solve this problem (at great expense) is to get custom made cabinetry built in for you by a carpenter. That's expensive.

Another way is to buy kitset kitchen cabinets and build them in yourself!

This does take a bit of skill, which we're still gaining but luckily we had my dad here helping (read: taking charge) this week.

It's also time-consuming; it took Dad and I three days, though we did also get a couple of other small things done in that time. I won't pretend to be the world's best apprentice, but hopefully I still sped things up!

My first accomplishment of the week was breaking one of our windows... Well, really it broke itself, the frame split and came clean off its hinges when I opened it. But it still slowed us down a bit... It's not really warm enough at the moment to leave a giant hole in the wall overnight.

Gorilla glue and duct tape got us there in the end... Super pro solution but it worked! 

Anyway, our cabinet fancifying technique (which we've now applied to two kitchens) is basically to build little walls around the top of each tall bank of cabinets, and then gib them in.

It can be pretty fiddly, especially in an old house where nothing is square, but (to me) the end result is well worth it, and takes the bog-standard cabinetry up a few pegs, as well as eliminating a few surfaces off the cleaning schedule, which is always welcome around here!

(side note: I love the look of open kitchen shelves, which are pretty popular at the moment, but just can't come to grips with all the dusting)

The first step was to slightly move the pantry. Because (naturally) I had changed my mind. I had originally thought I wanted the gib flush with the cabinet carcass and the doors sitting forward... And then decided that for the pantry and oven that the gib should be flush with the doors. So all the screws came out of the pantry, and some of the food I'd enthusiastically packed into it had to come out so we could scoot it back 10mm to permit everything to line up. On the bright side, I do think it looks good, and we gained 10mm of extra floor space in our kitchen. Woop woop! 10mm!

Step two was attaching the over fridge cupboard to the pantry, and then we did the timber framing up top. This follows standard wall construction methods, with a bottom plate (on the cabinet), top plate and studs. Remember to leave a 10mm allowance for the gib if you're picky about where it sits... I am. ;-)

Then we had to patch the messy bit of ceiling above the pantry where we'd changed the ducting. Although this is completely closed in from the kitchen I'd rather not have any risk of roof-dwelling creatures invading the space behind the pantry. So our brand new jigsaw (because what would a week of DIY be without a new power tool?) got its first workout and the ducting is nice and snug now.

We also made a side panel to box the ducting in behind the pantry, and a sort of lid that sits above the fridge, because it's a bit more complete that way and it'll help us keep all our precious heat in the bits of the room we're using.

Because we didn't want to lose any more room than we had to to wall framing, and the fridge cabinet was firmly secured from above, we chose to make the wing wall out of MDF. The framing at the top is the same as for the other cabinets, and at the bottom it's secured with little brackets screwed into the floor. These will be hidden by the fridge (and are the same as are used with standard melamine kitchen panels - which wouldn't have been tall enough and wouldn't be paintable so got vetoed).

Please don't rob us - we don't really have any valuables, the safe is for chocolate and (sadly) is empty anyway... 

Then the gib went on - another fiddly job. To keep the edges neat we used metal external corners and capping so that we can neatly stop and paint up to the cabinet (masking tape will be involved in that job, methinks!).

I guess maybe you want to see some photos? I forgot to tuck our super flash duct tape drawer handles away for these ones so apologies... Real handles coming soon!

And so the next job for the kitchen is some plastering and more painting. But first we need to finish the ducting for our gas central heating before the gas gets hooked up on Thursday (oh how glorious it will be to have a warm house and hot water to the kitchen taps!).

What do you think of our weird kitchen building technique? Will it catch on? Or are you happy dusting the tops of cabinets to avoid the extra building work? ;-)

Kitchen - the cabinets go in, part 1

Sorry I've been a bit quiet - there's a bit of a problem with blogging renovations, and that is that when you're in the midst of the exciting stuff you're way too busy renovating to blog about it. It doesn't help if you smush a first birthday party into the middle, either (although it does help us overall since that meant lots of awesome family help for us, due to birthday visits).

Since the floor was done a couple of weeks ago we've been waiting for the kitchen cabinets to arrive. We had family arriving on Thursday afternoon; we were hoping the kitchen cabinets would arrive before that so that we'd have a chance to put the pantry in and put some things away, to free up valuable floor space. Technically they did arrive before the first guests but only by about five minutes and none of them were off the truck yet!

However, since it was my parents who were the unlucky first, the pantry was in place before anyone else arrived because my dad is not one to rest on his laurels, even when he's purportedly on holiday. The timeline was something like this:

Thursday: cabinets arrive and are stacked in the corner and ignored while our house guest helps to assemble his own bed (a Murphy bed! More on that in another post sometime).
Friday: Pantry installed, some cabinets assembled and roughly placed in position. Other odd jobs done, mainly by our guests. We should have people to stay more often!
Saturday: Remaining cabinets assembled and placed in position. Some plumbing for new kitchen done. Manic cake baking and party preparations. First birthday party for our small person. We survived a whole year! He hasn't eaten any screws yet! Woohoo!
Sunday: Sort of rest day. Some tweaking to cabinet positions, other bits and pieces. Family time.
Monday: Cabinets properly leveled and fixed in place. Plumbing completed, dishwasher installed and temporary sink (from old kitchen) installed.

Thursday afternoon / Saturday morning / Sunday morning 

Our cabinets are from iKitchen, same as last time - we like them! They have various cabinet door options (and will send you swatches for you to check out) and we like the thermowrapped gloss doors - easy to keep clean and look fresh, but also won't date too quickly. This time around we looked at getting a profile door (think farmhouse kitchen or tongue and groove) but couldn't agree on a profile, felt it might look too busy and the profile doors are more expensive so in the end went back to the plain gloss finish.

The cabinets were just over $6k including delivery - a pricey part of the job but pretty good value considering what we got. Our kitchen includes a few slightly high-brow features including drawers in the pantry, a fancy-pants pull-out for the corner cupboard and some glazed wall cabinets (which I made a mistake on so need to be re-glazed, oops). They come flat-packed (with a couple of exceptions), or you can pay 10% extra and have them all delivered fully assembled. We're cheap so you know what we chose!

The kids were all pretty keen to help too!

Installing cabinets is more time consuming than you might think, and there are some tools which are essential for a good result, but it's completely achievable for a competent DIYer. That's not really us but we had my dad's help. ;-)

I have lots more photos and detail but perhaps will aim for installment two tomorrow so that I can go and put my feet up now that we have the house to ourselves for the first time in a while. Lazy, huh?

Designing a kitchen

We're in the midst of overhauling our kitchen at the moment (there will be many more posts relating to this, I'm sure!), and to me designing a new kitchen is one of the most fun parts of a renovation. Partly this is because of how transformational it is – a dowdy kitchen somehow seems to pull a whole house down – but also because there are so many parts to fit together, and activities to sequence. It’s proper project management and I love it!

This is the second time we’ve designed a kitchen, and I thought I’d share how I go about the planning – though two kitchens obviously doesn’t make me a pro, I’ve done a ton of research so hopefully have something helpful to share.

1.       Think about the goals
Everyone has different priorities, and while it’s usually sensible to keep your house reasonably normal for resale value (even if you’re planning to be there for a long time circumstances can change!) it’s most important to make it work for your family. For us, the main goals were:

• The kitchen being central to family life. This means it’s moving to an entirely different location within the house – a consent-requiring change – but that expense will pay off massively for us in liveability.
• Having plenty of working space – enough room for at least 2-3 people to be chopping side by side.
• Keeping it social. This kind of fits in with the first part but has also given us a wee breakfast bar area so that friends can chill out in the kitchen if we’re hosting.

Your priorities will probably be different to ours, so have a think and write them down at the start to make sure your planning continues to line up with them. 

2.       Look at the space you have available

Depending on your house there might be major work required, like removing a wall or shifting location within your house – or you might be able to make improvements within the existing space. Note that moving your kitchen to a different location within your house requires a building consent in New Zealand, whereas upgrading an existing kitchen (assuming you're not moving any structural or bracing walls) does not. 

3.       Work out what components are required

List out the appliances and services (oven and cooktop, sink, dishwasher, fridge, microwave), and how much storage you think you need. If you have an existing kitchen which provides enough storage make a list of the storage units and sizes – you can then use this to compare with your new plan to ensure you’ll still have enough room for everything.

4.       Draw a plan

You can use software (I use Microsoft Visio which isn’t perfect but works – and there are lots of free programs online) or go old school with pencil and paper. If you go the paper route I recommend making scale cut outs of your cabinets and appliances (or getting one of the Bunnings / Mitre 10 planning brochures you can cut out) so you can move them around the page without having to draw new versions constantly. 

My very unprofessional but serves-the-purpose kitchen plan.
The weird gaps represent dead space under the benchtop but won't be visible. 

I like to spend a few weeks on this – I come up with some ideas, then mull them over for a few days, tweak (or completely reconfigure) and then rinse and repeat until I can’t think of any improvements. It's also worth spending a bit of time reading up on kitchen design tenets (plenty of info readily available online) as there might be important factors you've overlooked, like making sure there's enough room to open the dishwasher. 

A few tips and pointers: 

• Some cabinets need extra buffer panels - for example corner cabinets usually need this. If space is constrained (e.g. if your cabinets run wall to wall) you'll want to confirm this before you finalise the plan to ensure you don't run out of room. 
• End units will need end panels or some other type of finishing except where they butt up to walls. You don't have to buy the purpose-made panels (we like to build our cabinets in with gib and framing where required) but you'll want something and will need to allow space for these too. 
• It's often easiest to do this with a list of the available cabinets and dimensions on hand - if you know where you'll get your cabinetry from get their price list, which will usually provide this info, or seek it out online. 
• Cabinets can be custom-made into just about every size and shape but usually this comes at a premium. If you can, design for the standard sizes as much as possible - you may still end up needing one or two custom cabinets but that'll be much less costly than a whole custom kitchen. 
• Google for ideas and design help - there's lots of info out there to help you along. 

5.       Confirm design factors 

There are lots of decisions to make – cabinet door shape and colour, handle type, wall colour, backsplash/tile colour, flooring materials, window treatments, benchtop material, lighting...

Google image search comes into play a lot in this stage too, and to avoid decision fatigue I take the easy route for things I don't feel strongly about. This can also help save the dollars - e.g. I scored some (barely) secondhand custom made curtains for the big kitchen window on TradeMe, much cheaper than getting new ones and they will be one of the biggest visual features. Obviously I couldn't choose the exact fabric - I had to accept one of the available options in the size needed (which can be a waiting game too). But now we have this bold feature it helps default some of the other decisions, like paint colour.  

6.       Source cabinetry and components

Cabinets can take a month or more to arrive so don't leave ordering them until the last minute. Also try to get orders in place for the other key components (like any major appliances) as early as you can. 

7.       Schedule the work

Plan out what needs to happen when - but leave some buffer time in your schedule, as there will always be something that crops up when you're not expecting it. 

It's smart to line up your key tradies (electrician, plumber, builder, plasterer, flooring specialist, is there a name for a benchtop person?) as if they're good at what they do it often takes a while to get into their calendar. 

Usually the sequence is something like this but sometimes things go in different orders depending on your design and specifics of your build: 

• Any building work / electrical pre-wiring / plumbing pre-runs
• Plastering & prep for painting
• Painting
• Installing cabinetry
• Benchtop
• Completing electrical work / plumbing
• Flooring

8. Be prepared for disruption! 

This isn't critical for the success of the project, but is for your mental health. Get some strategies in place - maybe you can set up a semi-kitchen in another room to tide you over, maybe you can just eat instant noodles for a couple of months (no, don't do that!). 

As I write this we have a sink, very small bench and our hack dishwasher in one room, with our dishes, cutlery and food in boxes and trays on the floor, and oven, fridge and microwave in another room. The whole floor seems to have a permanent layer of dust and it's not very fun for cooking, nor is it child-friendly... But it's a means to a very worthy end! 

Have you lived through a kitchen renovation? Do you have any tips to help us along? 

How to hot wire a dishwasher

Okay, so it's not really hot wiring, but if, like me, your existence is so pampered that the prospect of an extra month without a dishwasher seems intolerable, and you happen to have a tap which can serve the purpose, this is a good temporary solution. Especially because it's extremely easy!

This does require you to have an available hose tap or washing machine tap, as those already have threads on them that make the job easy (doing this with a sink tap would require changing out the fittings, which is probably getting in the too-complicated-for-short-term-gain category). You'll also need a drain nearby, and a power point for the dishwasher.

I should note that this is at your own risk - the main risk being leaks, so if you're at all unsure watch the connections when the dishwasher is running to avoid catastrophe. And if you're really unsure, get a plumber!

If you have those amenities, here's what you need to do:

1. Make sure you have the fittings you need

20mm crox / hex nipple

Depending on the proximity of your tap to the location of your dishwasher you may need an extra hose. We're using a hose tap outside the kitchen window, with the dishwasher inside, which means we need an extra hose to reach all the way through the window. I bought a 2m mesh-encased washing machine hose from Bunnings for $33. You can get cheaper versions but when it comes to plumbing I'm risk averse, even when it's a short term thing.

If you need the extra hose you will also need a fitting called a "20mm crox nipple" or "20mm hex nipple." This is a small piece of brass with an external thread on each end, so you can screw the two hoses together. It's a common plumbing fitting but the small Bunnings I visited didn't have it so I went to Zip Plumbing Plus - a full-size hardware store should have these though.

You'll also need some tape to make sure the drain is held in place - I picked some up from the plumbing store, you might already have something though, so long as it will hold.

2. Make sure the tap is running clear
This is just a precautionary step in case it hasn't been used for a while. Our house had been unoccupied for nearly a year when we moved in so there could have been some gremlins in the pipes and you don't want to clog up your dishwasher with gunk, so just run the tap for a minute or so to flush it out.

3. Connect up the hose
If you are using a second hose you'll need to screw both the dishwasher hose and the extension onto the nipple, and you'll also need to screw the other end onto your tap.

All connections need to be screwed on firmly - at least as firm as you can do with your bare hands. Using tools for this is not advised because you can damage the thread and that can cause leaks - but if you're a weakling like me gentle use of a tool may help get it snug (i.e. don't do it as tightly as you can with the tool, just use the tool to get it a bit tighter than you can with your hands). Otherwise get someone with strong hands to tighten it!

4. Fix the drainage in place
Put the drainage pipe from the dishwasher where you want it - ours is draining into the kitchen sink. This does mean the sink needs to be kept clear of obstructions to avoid flooding the kitchen (one of many reasons this is only a short term solution!).

The drainage pipe is the darker grey one poking down behind the mixer -
see the sophisticated tape job, only the best here! 

You will need to tape this firmly in place (ours is fixed to the taps in a highly professional manner) as it will move when draining. You know how garden hoses turn into vicious snakes when turned on full? The last thing you want is that happening in your kitchen with your dirty dishwater.

5. Turn on the dishwasher
Yep, simple as that! It pays to run a rinse cycle to flush it out before you wash a load of dishes (regardless of whether it's new or not) but otherwise you're good to go.

The dishwasher will be unstable without a bench above holding it in place, so you may want to rest something heavy on top of it, or at least be careful loading and unloading.

The finished setup... It'll do for now. 

So now, glory of glories, after six weeks without a dishwasher we have one again! Do you think we're nuts for setting it up, or are you similarly attached to yours?

Creating a haven

This post has been moved to my active blog: http://www.mrscake.co.nz/2015/08/diy-creating-haven.html.

Fake Furniture

This post has been moved to my active blog: http://www.mrscake.co.nz/2015/08/fake-furniture.html.